Archive for the ‘Social media’ Category

Is web 3.0 a mix of 2.0 and 1.0 ?

Sunday, October 16th, 2011

Web 1.0 was all about creating content – articles, news topics, how to’s – you name it. Websites were hubs of information rather than a site with videos od a dog on a skateboard. Then the revolution came and the main focus on the web shifted from articles to people. Web 2.0 was all about being social online. And people loved it! Sure it’s counter-productive most of the time, but how convenient, right? You can now see updates and pictures of your “internet friends” from all over the world, and you don’t even need to meet with them for coffee to know what they’re up to.

Web 2.0 has generated an impressive amount of content and lured non-power-users into the internet. The amount of valuable content declined rapidly, and dogs on skateboards started to be the main focus online. Sure if you need information there’s wikipedia and wolfram alpha, which in fact is an answer to all the lazy people who can’t look up the answer themselves. So there’s more and more “social” content, more and more ads, but less quality content to browse through.

The answer? Well all those websites with funny pictures and subtitles encouraged people to at least write something under the pic. That’s creative sometimes, right? And then they share it with their average of 450 friends (who really has that many?) and it becomes another dog on a skateboard. Question sites are actually a true sign of change – people can ask about anything, and complete strangers may answer their question, which is then rated as the most valuable answer. That’s building a knowledge base right there. But when blogging shifted from serious articles towards “what I did last night with my facebook friends” I guess the last parts of web 1.0 died that evening. Facebook is trying to swallow some of that 1.0 juice by adding wikipedia answers to it’s searches, but seriously – who uses that?

Is internet eventually going to be about porn, shallow relationships with people and funny pictures only? What do you think?

Posted in Advertising, Creative processes, future, Social media, Thinking, web 3.0 | No Comments »

Blog spam techniques keep evolving

Saturday, October 8th, 2011

Surely everyone who has ever written a blog knows, that even with akismet and all those other fancy gizmos, spam is constantly there. It can be characterized as landfills and trash dumps of modern technology, that just keeps piling up and there’s always more. But stating the existence of spam nowadays is like saying we need air to breathe. Pointless. What I want to focus on is how spam comments are evolving to trick us into clicking approve.

Here’s some statistics:

Email spam is done by about 5 million botnets, that send 88% of all spam messages. 90% of spam is in English (that’s understandable) and 91% contains links. 66% is about pharmaceutical things like viagra,cialis etc. In 2010 alone 107 billion mails were sent, out of which 89,1% was spam. Good news is that the amount of spam is decreasing by about 1% each year. The biggest fall is in email spam, because of better filters, and people simply ignoring those messages after learning how they work. A lot of spam moved to blog comments though, either to move traffic to other websites, or increase google popularity. So what kinds of spam are there?

Praise spam

Praise spam is the most common one – everyone wants to hear compliments, and if we get a comment that says “great blog! I’ve bookmarked it!” or “Great writing style, keep it up!” or thins like:

  1. This would be the best weblog for anybody who wishes to discover this subject.
  2. Wonderful article. I’m dealing with a few these issues.
  3. This is actually a very good posted post, and I have bookmarked this web site for future reference.
  4. Hi, this has been an excellent read and in addition I have bookmarked this webpage
  5. A truly amazing article. Thanks for sharing you’re wealth of knowledge with us once again
  6. It is a excellent suggestions particularly to people new to blogosphere, quick and correct information
  7. Greetings! I would just like to thank you for the first class info you have here on this post.
  8. Fantastic goods from you, man. I have understand your stuff previous to and you’re just extremely magnificent.

Help offerings (mostly SEO)

That comes from the fact that most blogs are not popular. That’s how life works and we should learn to deal with it. So when we see a help offer: to boost our stats, to earn more money, whatever – we unintentionally take notice of that comment before realizing it is spam. Some people apparently don’t realize that, because the spam bots are still doing this.

  1. Hello, I found your website by searching Google, but I noticed it was not on the first page.
  2. I found you on Google so I thought I’d share this tip with you. There is a WordPress SEO addon that does automated SEO for your blog
  3. make your blog a source of income that can count on
  4. My team provides professional article writing, and we are able to do it for $0.01 per word – that’s $4 for a 400 word article.
  5. There are a lot of approaches in which you can preserve cash.
  6. Hi, check how to make more money with your blog

Pointing out mistakes (that’s a new one)

If praise isn’t really your thing, maybe criticism is. Or maybe if a bot is smart enough (yeah, right!) to criticize you, then it’s not a bot, but a real comment you can approve? Silly them ;)

  1. of course like your web site but you have to check the spelling on quite a few of your posts
  2. I’m not sure I completely agree with the point and view

Total gibberish and idiomatic idiocy

Sometimes what we get is a string of words or phrases taken from books, randomized and weird. It looks like it’s some twisted, drug induced poetry and sometimes it is. I actually like this type of spam sometimes – especially when I can compile a couple of those into a song, that’s as deep lyrically as Radioheads gibberish ;) (I still like their music though)

  1. you command get got an edginess over that you wish be delivering the following. unwell unquestionably come more formerly again since exactly the same nearly a lot often inside case you shield this increase.
  2. A fall into a pit, a gain in your wit
  3. Great mens sons seldom do well

We can learn to fight it or we can learn to ignore it. But we must be aware that bots are a considerable part of our reader base. So this post is a tribute to them. Thank you for visiting my site bots! ;)

 

 

Posted in Advertising, Know how, Site related, Social media, Thinking | No Comments »

Angry Birds addiction chart!

Sunday, October 2nd, 2011

Rovio released Angry Birds two years ago, and in those two years time it reached over 300 million downloads, becoming the biggest phenomenon in computer gaming. It’s available for nearly every platform, sans the fridge (yet!) and for some reason people can’t stop playing it. The infographic below summarizes all the things we know about the game, like the amount of time people spend “in-game” each hour (16 years). What’s funny that there were more birds shot with that virtual slingshot, than there are living on our planet right now. Any Angry Birds addicts here?

 

http://c580513.r13.cf2.rackcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/AngryBirdsinfographic.jpg?9d7bd4

Posted in App, Social media, Viral | No Comments »

Myspace and facebook, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em

Saturday, November 20th, 2010

Well it’s not exactly that simple, but myspace or my[  ] as they’re now choosing to be called realized that on the social level they will never win with facebook. So now they’re sort of merging, allowing facebook connect to log into myspace, and share friends and information between both sites. And from this day on myspace will be about delivering content (since facebook doesn’t really do a good band page) and facebook will be your social interactions.

By merging and diversifying myspace can regain some of it’s long-lost powers and thrive alongside facebook instead of competing with the behemoth. And that might actually be a good idea. The merger is called ‘mashup’ and we’ll see how well it’ll do pretty soon.

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Posted in Social media, Thinking | No Comments »

Interfaces of the present

Tuesday, November 9th, 2010

Since the Washington Post made an iPad app too, I think it’s both the time to elaborate on interfaces and the time to admit, that the change is surely coming. The dying press industry can actually revive with this new medium, which is good because we need well written content. There’s nothing wrong with amateur bloggers, but the most valuable content is and will always be made by professional writers and journalists. So now we have the chance to try those out because the new york times, washington post and newsweek all made really nice applications that bring the press to the new medium. And of course they will also be available on other tablets when they finally come out. And that leads to a conclusion that there’s another change in interfaces coming.

Apparently a click to view interface doesn’t really work with press on a tablet. No, every one of the magazines has swiping motion to change pages / browse through articles. People don’t like to point and click, they like to browse. And what’s more natural than a swiping motion? Right!

And since the tablets are slowly taking over, we might want to consider websites that are also navigated that way (or can be navigated with both regular and modern touch controls). That might lead to a regression of thought, because we’re actually coming back to the system that was dominant before the PC revolution. And this system is already catching on. So it might either be a case of nostalgia, or simply a way to do it right. And if it’s the latter we should consider that with all of our feature layouts.

Below you can see the AD for washington post, pretty funny, especially the last sentence ;)

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Posted in Advertising, App, Social media, Technology | No Comments »

Facebook makes changes (again)

Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010

Facebook has announced on their recent conference that they’re adding some new features to their mobile apps. They are on 200 million mobile devices which is pretty impressive (and nearly on every single iphone) but I’m not sure the direction they’re heading is the right one.

Adding “deals” into “facebook places” gives us – well, deals – and that’s fine, we pay less for goods or services and we can be all thankful for it, right ? Well normally we would, but there’s this one little tiny detail that’s a little “wrong” here. The question “why?”. Sure the easy answer would be – to keep the #1 position in light of the recent myspace changes, but the real reason I think is a little different. “Places” itself tell facebook a lot of things about it’s users and now knowing which deals they used will actually make tham know anything but our thoughts. At least until there’s an app for that.

Sure many users don’t really mind because we’re being controlled all the time by governments and corporations, but I think some people don’t like others to know where they are. I never pay with a credit card at a club, maybe it’s my personal paranoia – but I will be turning the “Places” feature off. Along with the deals. At least most of the time. Keeping it constantly on would lead to even better advertising, tailored directly to us.

But we’ll see where it all leads after a few years anyway. Hopefully it won’t lead to <a href=”http://www.bp.com”> a disaster </a>. But we all know how facebook is when it comes to “privacy”.

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Posted in Social media | No Comments »

Myspace transforming into My “[ ]“

Wednesday, October 27th, 2010

A few years ago myspace was the online king nearing 200 million users. Then along came facebook with all it’s drama (see “the social network”) and change all that. People stopped using myspace as if it was a bag of worms. And we can all bet that myspace advertisers felt that, and myspace CEO’s felt that too. So they decided to change, and what’s better than a really BIG change? Nothing. So they decided to change the site from the ground up, including the very familiar logo they had. We’ll see if it’s gonna steal the users back from facebook or is it just one more try of a dying company. Nevertheless the move is pretty bold so good luck to Tom! Below you can see how it’s rougly gonna look like in november.

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Posted in Design from the web, Social media | No Comments »

E-paper / E-newspaper / E(nd)-of-paper

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

ebooks

There’s a lot of recent developments in the publishing business. And some of it is pretty revolutionary. I finally had a chance to play a little bit with the Amazon Kindle and I actually love the E-Ink screen and the long lasting battery. It provides a reading experience very similar to a real book, especially if you have a nice, leather case for it that pretends to be a hardcover. But the point is to have your entire Library in your … well, bag – since it won’t really fit in your pocket unless you’re really really big ;)

But there will be changes (as I predicted a while ago). The whole thing occurred to me for a couple of reasons. And here’s what they are:

(more…)

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Posted in Creative processes, Social media, web 3.0 | No Comments »

How much is a facebook fan worth? 30 cents!

Monday, April 19th, 2010

facebookandmoney

Social media marketing platform company Vitrue has determined that the average value of a Facebook ‘fan’ is about $3.60 in equivalent media each year. This calculation is based on having one million Fan Page fans, and is not weighted for brand recognition.

Ok but what does that actually mean? First let’s try and see how did they get that number.

Let’s add it up

A company posting twice a day and having a million fans will get 60 million impressions every month. Vitrue used $5 CPM (which is a cost for a thousand impressions) and 60M impressions ended up being $300,000 per month of media value. That means that for the same amount of views the company would’ve paid that much in other media. That 300,000 is a monthly value, so per year it’d be somewhere close to 3,6 Million dollars. Dividing that by a million “Fans” we get $3,6. Is that right? Does it really work that way?

Let’s break it down

Posting twice a day for a month? 60 posts in a month? Can you imagine still being a fan of a company after you’ve been bombarded by information about them twice a day for a month? A year? Would anyone “stay as a fan” in that case? And what would they inform us about? In most cases we’d be done with all of the company’s products in a few days or weeks. So what’s next? “Buy buy buy” statuses? Sure we can say that if you put all of the oceans water in a small tube, the length of the tube would be REALLY F***ING BIG. Right?

The real number anyone?

So how many posts a month are we talking about to maintain a brand awareness and not loose the fans? I’m thinking 5 posts per month would be the right number. That would be almost 1 post per week so our “fans” won’t have their status feeds flooded, and yet they will notice us. So what do the numbers tell us in such a case? Let’s assume that we do have a million fans. So we get 5 million impressions. That is $25,000 per month. So in a year it’ll be $300,000 and thus the value of one facebook fan per year is $0,3. Which is 30 cents. And that seems a lot more natural than $3,6. Right?

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Posted in Advertising, Social media | 2 Comments »